My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley'imperial socialism'. It emerged again in 1929 in the developed form of a viableeconomic area under the general direction of a strong central government.The key word insulation enters the political vocabulary in the following passage: 'Iwant now to suggest that the policy of controlled imports can and should be extendedto other trades, for this reason: that if we are to build up a home market it must beagreed that this nation must to some extent be insulated from the electric shocks ofpresent world conditions. You cannot build a higher civilisation and a standard of lifewhich can absorb the great forces of modern production if you are subject to pricefluctuation from the rest of the world which dislocates your industry at every turn, andto the sport of competition from virtually slave conditions in other countries. Whatprospects have we, except the home market, of absorbing modern production?'I had already established the premise of this argument in the following passage: 'Wemust always, of course, export sufficient to buy our essential foodstuffs and rawmaterials, but we need not export enough to build up a favourable trade balance forforeign investment of £100,000,000 a year, or to pay for the import of so manymanufactured luxury articles as today come into the country. We have to get awayfrom the belief that the only criterion of British prosperity is how many goods we cansend abroad for foreigners to consume. Whatever may be said for or against therecovery of the swollen export trade that we had before the war, the fact remains thatit is most difficult ever to restore that condition again, and facts have to be faced if weare to find any outlet for our present production.'I was now fairly launched into a long-term programme which took me beyond Keynesand all the thinking of that period. It becomes even clearer at this point of the speechthat the whole policy on which I resigned was sharply divided between an ad hocemergency programme to meet the immediate unemployment crisis and a long-termpolicy to reconstruct the whole basis of our industrial life, changing our economyfrom a financiers' to a producers' system.The long-term policy went far beyond the short-term programme, and some waybeyond the Birmingham proposals. The only sharp clash between the old thinking andmy new thinking in the short-term lay in the concept of deficit financing, and there Ihad the massive support of Keynes, not only in his theory but as already noted in hispersonal intervention. The long-term policy on the other hand entered seas whichwere then completely uncharted, whose tidal force all these years later drives Britainto recognise the basic justice of that economic analysis in seeking entry to the largelyinsulated area of the Common Market. For to create a system insulated from the worldshocks which have rendered increasingly difficult our industrial position and weredescribed in detail for the first time in that speech, it was necessary to discover anddevelop a viable economic area, and that could only be found either in the Empire orin Europe. When the Empire was lost Europe became the only possibility for Britainto enter a system containing the two necessities: internal planning, and insulationfrom the disruption of external factors. The dangers which have now arisen and theneeds which are now agreed were foreseen and presented in that speech, but theywere then denied by the full force of orthodox opinion and obstructed by the fullweight of the party machines.My long-term policy also went beyond the Birmingham proposals, because in essence211 of 424